Critical theme parks: Dismaland, Disney and the politics of theming

This essay discusses Banksy’s 2015 installation ‘Dismaland’ and identifies it as belonging to a new subgenre of theme parks: the critical theme park. Whereas immersive spaces have increasingly addressed controversial issues, theme parks are, the essay notes, still stuck in their traditional niche of commercial entertainment. Dismaland, by contrast, turns theme parks’ established politics of theming on their head to give the medium a social and cultural relevance that matches its enormous worldwide popularity. After reviewing the public and academic debate about controversial theming, the essay shows how Dismaland combines the representational strategies of traditional theme parks with the themes of street art to creatively extend theme parks’ heretofore self-imposed and/or inflicted thematic restrictions. Accordingly, Dismaland’s iconoclastic use of Disney(land) imagery is read as reflecting a recent trend in theme park design that may be referred to as ‘autotheming’ rather than as ‘Disney-bashing’ or ‘brandalism’. The conclusion suggests that the critical theme park may signal the medium’s return to the controversially themed amusement parks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but, in the light of some of the apparent contradictions in Dismaland’s day-to-day operation, also focuses on the limits of the critical theme park.